This week the challenge is to write about drowning. Maybe your physically drowning in an ocean, or perhaps you are drowning under the weight of work and life. However, you use the prompt, include drowning somehow, even if it leads you off into another direction.

A friend recently suggested I take some time to look at Canva. I tried not to raise an eyebrow, time is not a commodity I can spare much of to learn new things. But I trusted their professional suggestion and trotted along to investigate this new fangled site.

Having scrutinised it, I have to say I highly recommend it as a design site. For those of you who don’t have photoshop and illustrator its the perfect substitute. It has a plethora of professional looking templates for everything from book covers, blog photos, infographics, flyers, posters, cover photos… anything you could want it has pre made templates which you can edit to your hearts desire.

If you want to increase your blog traffic next year I am certain this tool will help.

It’s almost Christmas, so I am not expecting a huge amount of entries this week. So to encourage you a little more, I am setting my favourite timed challenge. Write me a brain dump in 120 seconds about the topic in the post.

Remember, find a timer, set it for 120 seconds, write hard and fast till the timer ends. AND, don’t peek inside this post until you are ready to play.

This ones for Sarah, I wrote it as a sprint exercise with her a while ago.

Some time ago, I wrote a post examining how YA fantasy/dystopian novels opened, you can find it here. Well, the other day, I watched the final instalment of the Mockingjay from the Hunger Games trilogy. Despite its brutality, there was one particular line right at the end of the film that piqued my interest. So I decided to flip that post on its head and look at YA endings.

Katniss climbed into bed with Peeta, gave him a hug and he leant in to say:

“You love me, real or not real?” and Katniss said, “Real.”

Time to admit a dirty secret I have been harbouring for a while now – yes, I’m ashamed! I haven’t read the Hunger Games. I know. I know. I’m a YA Fantasy/Dystopian writer, how could I NOT have read the Hunger Games…? It just sort of happened. Lets not talk about it. I’ll fix it…Soon.

Anyway, there we were in the cinema and I leant over to to Mrs. Black and did the unthinkable, whispered in the middle of the film. I said… That right there, that’s the last line of the book. She raised an eyebrow and asked me how I knew. I didn’t have the answer, so I shrugged, “I just did.”

There are a couple of films that after the first time I saw them, I felt a little bit less sane. The two biggest culprits being: The Matrix and The Truman Show. They messed with my head, my perception of reality in a way I cannot explain. In my defence I was only 12 when they were released in 1999. It’s weird though isn’t it. When something so ridiculous, so controversial it couldn’t possibly be true, sews just the tiniest seed of doubt.

Curtsey of Wiki: The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.

For a few thousand years, we thought the world was flat. All 5 big religions, had accepted and promoted theories of a flat Earth. They believed the Earth was flat and at the edge was protected by something called the firmament – whilst they might have differed in their beliefs, they were united on this.

It wasn’t until Copernicus in the 16th century realised the world spun at over 1000mph and 60,000 mph round the sun, that he proposed the globe model. From these calculations he surmised the world was round. That’s it. No more proof no more evidence, it was accepted into mainstream society and still is to this day.

It’s one of those fundamental ideas we are taught on the first day of primary school; the world, is 100% round.